Juliäntli is a tiny, handcrafted rhythm game about ducks. You psychedelically click some ducks while they freak out over their awesome beat. It’s short, it’s crazy and a fun experience!

FAQuack

What is Juliäntli?

Juliäntli is a simple rhythm game where you click ducks on the beat. When you hit the ducks, they will activate their special abilities. Green ducks will give you more time to play, blue ducks attract other ducks around them and red ducks destroy ducks in the vicinity. There are also combo ducks which will give you more points and more time, but you have to hit them in the right order to not break the combo.

What is the goal in Juliäntli?

Mostly enjoying a crazy game with duck techno. But if that’s not enough, there is a global high score to beat.

How do I get the most points?

Points are calculated the following way:

Normal ducks

The smaller the duck is when you hit it, the more points (because it is harder to hit)

The score gets multiplied by your beat combo

Combo ducks

The more combo ducks you hit in a row, the more points

Size doesn’t matter

The score gets multiplied by your beat combo

Who made the awesome soundtrack for the game?

Why did you make Juliäntli?

Juliäntli is a birthday gift for my boyfriend. I wanted to give him something special, and since making games is the only thing I’m good at, I made him this game. Ducks are an insider joke in our relationship, so I wanted to make a game about ducks. The name of the game, Juliäntli, is a combination of his name “Julian” and the Swiss German word for duck, “Äntli”.

Why is the game not free?

Since the game is super tiny and a birthday gift, it’s totally legitimate to ask why Juliäntli is not free. I decided to sell it for 1$ for the following reasons:

I don’t think games should be free. Almost all game developers I know put a lot of sweat, time and effort into their games. They do everything they can to make a fun game for the players, sometimes even more than would be healthy for themselves. That’s why I think it is a good thing to pay for games (and thereby also for music, movies and so on). So even though I did not make this game to make money, to me this symbolic fee is important.

I did not create everything for this game myself. I asked a friend who is a composer to create the soundtrack. I would like to give him some bucks for his awesome work and I would also like to be able to pay him for future tracks for the game. Which leads me to the next point:

While working on the game, we (the composer and I) realized, that we would like to further develop this game after the initial release (which of course is my boyfriends birthday). All the money we get from the Juliäntli sales will be used to add more content to the game.

You mentioned further content. What would that be?

We would love to let the players decide on that. Let us know what you want to see in the game! Things we think would be great are for example:

Settings for audio delay

More songs

More and harder levels

More ducks with different abilities

Customization (For example skills that you can unlock and choose from)

Release on other platforms

As the game is so tiny, why is it not early access?

By putting the game on Steam I wanted to make the birthday gift for my boyfriend more special than… just giving him a USB drive with the game I guess? So I would like the game to be released on his birthday.

I bought the game and was disappointed. What can I do?

We know that the game is tiny and we don’t want to rip off players. Feel free to refund, we want our players to be happy players.